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Beryl Mungai grew up as a middle child, the one caught between voices louder than her own. She was quiet, observant, someone who processed the world internally. In any room, she felt like everyone else should speak first, even when she had something to say.
So she coped the way a lot of quiet kids do. She wrote. She wrote so much that by the time she was still in school, she'd authored books that earned her a meeting with the five presidents of the East African Community. It sounds impressive, and it was. But for Beryl, it was survival.
When it came time to decide what to study at university, Beryl knew exactly what she wanted even if she didn't fully grasp why yet. Psychology. She'd heard the words psychologist, counselor, and something about them felt like an answer. She was eager to make sense of herself: who she was as a person and why she behaved the way she did.
Studying psychology opened her mind to what she'd been carrying. It gave her context for where she'd been as a child and why she'd felt the way she did. And then the question shifted: how many kids are like me? How many have no one to talk to, even with both parents present? How many are being seen but not truly heard?
These questions became the foundation of everything that followed.
Building New Beginnings
In 2020, just as COVID began to ease, Beryl started New Beginnings, an organization dedicated to mental wellness for children and adolescents. It began informally. Parents were reaching out online, desperate for help. My child hasn't been talking for days. My child is using drugs. What do I do?
After graduating in 2021, Beryl interned at Mathari and kept seeing the same pattern: kids chased from schools for behavioral issues or drug use, sent for mandatory therapy as a condition of return. It confirmed what she already knew. There was a massive gap in how children's mental health was being handled.
Since then, she has grown a team and developed an eight-week curriculum that integrates mental health support with substance abuse prevention, treating the two not in isolation but as interconnected realities in a child's life. The curriculum wasn't created in isolation either. She worked with partners at the Brain and Mind Institute, NACADA, psychiatrists, professors, teachers, and the kids themselves to ensure it was rigorous, evidence-based, and actually useful in practice.
Her team works with schools, runs holiday camps, and develops workbooks and mental wellness games for children. Play therapy sessions start as young as three and a half, where Beryl spends quite a bit of time observing their behavior. With children, so much is communicated without words.
"I wanted to create a space where I felt I would really, really understand the kids better." Beryl says.
For Beryl, this work is personal in ways that go beyond professional calling. "I see this space as just another chance to heal," she says. "I am helping these kids, but I'm also healing. Every time I go through a session with kids and they become better, it heals me. It heals what I feel I never got."
How She Actually Works
Beryl doesn't believe therapy has to look a certain way. She doesn't sit in a four-walled room with two chairs and a tissue box. She takes kids to play spaces, to the mall. She meets them where they are, literally and emotionally.
She partners closely with specialists like behavior analysts, speech therapists, and psychiatrists. This way, when a case falls outside her expertise, whether it's a neurodivergent child or someone dealing with severe trauma, she refers them to professionals specifically trained for that work. She believes specialization matters, especially when working with children.
"A general psychologist cannot fully help a neurodivergent child," she says. "That child needs someone who's done behavioral specialist training. It's a very deep field.”
Her focus areas include grief, childhood trauma, and the issues that emerge in adolescence. She's noticed a pattern among the adults she works with: most of their struggles stem from unresolved childhood experiences. People don't realize the weight of their past until they're in their thirties, in relationships, raising children of their own.
The Policy Dream
Beryl doesn't just want to help individual children. She wants to change the system that harms them.
In the future, she sees herself in policy spaces, joining technical working groups at the Ministry of Health and perhaps the Mental Health and Counselors Board. Being in the rooms where laws are written, where someone finally mandates that schools bring in specialists instead of expelling children for behavioral struggles.
She's building New Beginnings toward that future. A physical space with a child-friendly environment and an empowered core team. She wants to help shift how Kenya treats its children, one policy at a time.
Beryl, Off the Clock
Outside of therapy, Beryl is a former pageant queen who competed in Miss Commonwealth 2025 and placed first runner-up. People assume it's about wearing heels and looking polished, but for Beryl, pageantry is grounding. It demands discipline, hours of training, and relentless focus.
She also runs a fashion brand called Beryl by Design. When she's not in session, she's at a sewing machine, collaborating with tailors, or searching for fabrics in Eastleigh. Her mom often asks when she rests. Beryl doesn't have a good answer.
She loves reading, walking through Karura Forest, running, and traveling whenever she gets the chance.
What might surprise you about Beryl? She eats everything with ketchup. Boiled eggs, pizza, chapati, all of it. She even carries sachets in her bag just in case a restaurant runs out!
Beryl specializes in child and adolescent mental wellness for ages 3.5 to 18, with a focus on grief, childhood trauma, and integrating mental health support with substance abuse prevention. She founded New Beginnings, an organization dedicated to this work. You can learn more at newbeginningskg.org.
You can find her profile here to learn more and reach out.
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